As CNET and others are reporting the Department of Homeland security has now publically issued a proclaimation that they have the right to seize laptops of people crossing the border into or out of the united states.

A pair of DHS policies from last month say that customs agents can routinely--as a matter of course--seize, make copies of, and "analyze the information transported by any individual attempting to enter, re-enter, depart, pass through, or reside in the United States." (See policy No. 1 and No. 2.)

These searches may occur whether or not the person is accused of wrong doing, and has survived at least 1 challenge in court.  Suprisingly the California 9th Circuit court (a bastion of progressive thought) upheld the use of evidence gained in this fashion.

So what can you do about it?  There are a few things.  First of all write to your congressman and protest this.  Second encrypt your hard drive (or at least the personal information)  True Crypt is a free program which utilizes various levels of encryption (including RSA which is darn near unbreakable) to create an encrypted space on your drive.  If you follow the best practices when using this software, they may seize your laptop, but they wont be able to see much, and so far their directive does not grant the right to force you to disclose the password to your compressed files.

Lastly, as Wikipedia and others report, EnCase (The software used to gather information from a hard drive in an admissible fashion) is vulnerable to Compression bombs.  A Compression bomb is a zip file which while quite small, appears to be absolutely gigantic when unzipped.  The classic example of this is the 42.zip file which is only 42k when zipped, but appears to be 16 petabytes in size when unzipped.  Good luck opening that up.

Stopping terrorism is a tough job, and Homeland Security (and others) have to walk a fine line between civil rights to privacy and protecting society. In this case they have stepped over the line and we need to call them on it.